VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2
JUNE 2013
VOLUME 3, ISSUE 2 June 2013
All work is the property of the attributed writers and artists. Copyright Š Loose Change magazine 2013 www.loosechangemagazine.org
Editor's Letter Molly Dickinson
Whenever I sit down to stitch together an issue of Loose Change, I reach for its threads—those strings of words, images, voice and tone that connect our latest collection from first page to last. I imagine it’s like piecing together a quilt culled from the fragments that caught one’s eye here and tempted one’s hand there, or framing favorite photographs to hang in sequence down a waiting hallway. Each must complement the next, bridge what comes before and fit neatly, like a puzzle piece or a musical note, into a single, harmonious composition. It’s a process of discovery, not creation. Everything each element has to give is already here, ripe, polished and waiting. While each issue holds its share of perfectly matched pairs and fruitful juxtapositions, this one is bursting with them. I could say it’s because this is our Summer Issue, grown extra lush under the influence of sun and storm, or that it’s due to the grateful, sustaining success of our spring rebirth. (Those who read our Reprise issue may notice a familiar name on these pages, one of several who continue—and, we hope, will always continue—to share their work with Loose Change.) But either of these would be a poetic stretch, at best. The nearer truth? It’s just sweet, simple luck. And since we all know that luck—like the best of summer— is not only sweet and simple, but golden and fleeting, I encourage you to enjoy this issue accordingly.
Table of Contents Cover art, From the Series Light in Purse, No. 074,!11” x 14”, photography by Christina Price Washington Editor’s Letter Table of Contents
May Cause Drowsiness, poetry by Howie Good Art Notes, poetry by Howie Good
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2
The Failed Sketches, poetry by Anton Frost
3
Unexpected, nonfiction by Ann Wilson 6 Light in Purse, photography by Christina Price Washington From the Series Light in Purse, No. 074,!11” x 14”
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From the Series Light in Purse, No 080,!11” x 14”
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From the Series Light in Purse, No. 040, 11” x 14”
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From the Series Light in Purse, No. 081, 11” x 14”
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From the Series Light in Purse, No. 088, 8” x 10”
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Scene from a 21st Century Holistic Medical Romance, poetry by Will Holland Social Justice, fiction by Kristin Leydig Bryant Night in the County, poetry by Howie Good Summer of Love, poetry by Howie Good
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What We Go For, fiction by Christine Hoffmann
Contributors
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26
15
May Cause Drowsiness Howie Good
A man, about my age, on the up escalator clutches a bright yellow plastic bag to his chest. The bag says infinity shoes right on it. I took a pill that may cause drowsiness. Everyone’s head contains all sorts of secret hiding places. In infinity shoes, you could, theoretically, walk forever.
Art Notes Howie Good
1 William Burroughs wouldn’t appear anywhere without his hat. It just swam around inside the clear plastic bag like a goldfish. 2 The first paint was probably animal blood. Art is dangerous. 3 Everything that happens, they say, happens for a reason. The sun will shine for at least another 6 billion years.
The Failed Sketches Anton Frost
I draw you in pencil by listening to your movements beneath fabric. By peeling open pomegranates and leaving them lying in different! phases of moon, I drain your segments over each other in watercolor. It's not long before! you are a gathering of toppled crescents, a sphere breaking into sensations, a door that is not open, not closed. I sketch you with pebbles for cells,! umlauts for a voice, an uppercase “G” for each ear. Days pass for your eyes.! Days pass like letters of the alphabet. Animals die in all your spans. An hour is a strand of hair, a week is a warmth off the side of your neck. I add color with the pomegranate’s wetness. You strike different poses by telling me how you wish you could live,
by telling me how you are actually living. I give you my tenth, hundredth, and thousandth drafts and feel no closer to finishing than the first: “a fawn in colored pencil on an island of grass, the word EARTHLING! floating over its head in block letters.” In distress I scribble a leafless tree, black with rain and a bright sky. It resembles my nervous system. It looks like a blaze of something you know, something I have yet to realize. You look at my piles of sketches, touching corners of pages gently. “You do not need to be here for all this,” I say. I am not sure if I am talking to you or to myself. Next I draw your open mouth, taking up a whole page. Inside it I dictate what you say: “The sphere is the form, The circle is the shape. The curve is the notion: The vanishing line that started here had my name.”
This could go on forever. You keep becoming different things— water spilling over the lip of a cup, a pocket knife flipping open in midair like a flower. A window being opened by a woman with a cloud of suds on each wrist transforms into an oblong patch of continent from an old world map, the shape that land takes when it is too distant! to make out clearly,! when it is more imagined than real. I give up by gazing at you. I snap a pencil in two, handing you the lead portion. The eraser stays with me.! After we agree to meet later, you touch my shoulder as you leave. It is such a relief that we already exist.
Unexpected Ann Wilson
The ultrasound that should have shown bumps as numerous as pomegranate seeds resembled instead a craterless moon. Stinging, burning potions from long, mean needles three times a day for two weeks in August failed.!The injection battle site covered my hips, thighs and stomach, but Madame Ovary had protected herself from invasion. I sobbed on the exam table, despair riding the synthetic hormones coursing through me. “There’s no need for tears,” the doctor patted my knee as she spoke.!“We can try again in October.!Don’t worry, dear.!I’ll admit this is a mystery, but we’ll solve it.”!She closed my file and walked out the door. ! I wanted to smash her smug, lying face into the shiny linoleum floor. “YOU SAID it would work,” I wanted to yell. “YOU SAID I was perfect. You didn’t say anything about a mystery!” Simon reached to help my feet out of the stirrups but I pulled away and sat up on my own. He handed me a towel for the gel oozing out of my traitor body. I threw it across the room. He tried to hold me and I shoved him. “Stop it!” I snarled. I hated him. I hated his virility. I hated him for having a mother. ! I was completely powerless over the Furies possessing my psyche. The collision of my mother’s death with this futile fertility fight seethed in me, like lava. I desperately needed to create life, but I was too hot, lethal. I could only malign and destroy. Simon stepped back, confused, frustrated, and helpless. Which made me angrier. I had seen his vulnerability a lot lately, especially since April 1st, a pointless holiday but also my grandfather’s 90th birthday which was on a Monday that year. So, my mother’s family chose the Sunday before to throw a party in celebration of the their patriarch, Dick Turner—big-game hunter, deep-sea fisherman, former supervisor of the now closed textile mill, father of seven who had survived the death of his wife and two sons, grandfather of ten and counting.!He was a legend in his small town, and almost a hundred people came to honor him. ! Feasting on fried chicken and sweet tea, Mama hugged former school teachers, childhood friends, and retired mill workers with weathered, dark brown faces who still called her “Miss Shirley.”!When the party ended, she brought her two sisters home to spend the night, because they were all heading to Florida for vacation the next day. I called her Sunday night to find out how my grandfather’s party went. She sounded joyful when she said she and her sisters were in their pajamas, reminiscing over muscadine wine, this last part whispered to protect their Baptist reputations. Monday morning, around seven, I was still in what Simon called my “mole-girl” phase when the phone rang. Eyes barely open, warming to the first cup of coffee, I sat on the sofa, staring into the middle distance. Simon answered and started repeating “oh no, oh I’m so sorry,” sounds that someone had died. How poetic, I thought, Paw Turner passed away on his 90th birthday. That sweet sadness for an elder’s passing filled my eyes and I walked to the kitchen to confirm my intuition. Simon held the phone toward me. “Your mother’s dead,” he said.
I dropped my coffee. There was a brick in my throat and something squeezed my chest.!I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to push the stupid words back in his mouth, but I couldn’t move. I needed to reverse time, and get back on the sofa. The phone looked far off, down the end of a long tunnel that I didn’t want to go through.!But Daddy was on the other end. He would help me. He would know what to do. “Daddy…” I couldn’t say anything else. He said he had noticed that her foot had fallen from under the blankets that morning when he went to wake her so he reached down to put it back in the bed. It was cold – too cold. He called her name, but she did not stir.!He shook her, but she didn’t open her eyes. He shouted for her sisters. She had been dead for over an hour, we found out later. After they called 911, Mama’s younger sister placed Daddy in bed beside her silent body, pulled the covers over them and shut the door. He emerged a short while later to call his children. “The ambulance and the police are on the way,” he said on the phone. !! But didn’t an ambulance mean she was still alive? Why were the police coming? When was somebody going to let me in on this gruesome joke? “The 911 operator said the police have to rule out foul play,” he said, suddenly in a little boy’s tone. ! “Are Evelyn and Norma still with you?” ! “Yes.” A shred of grace. Simon and I had not gone to my grandfather’s celebration because I was still anemic and sore from having my gut rearranged a month or so before.!If we had gone, my aunts would have spent the night elsewhere. Even in their shock and grief, my aunts would provide more comfort to the now widower than we possibly could: a son-in-law with no more sense than to blurt “your mother’s dead” and a gutted daughter losing her mind. “OK, Daddy, we’re on the way. I love you,” I said, and hung up, and backed away from the murdering phone. And screamed. ! There was no room in me for Mama to die.!The sorrow of the baby I couldn’t make had already taken that space. Mama had been so alive, so capable when she nursed me after my five-hour surgery, spending each night in my hospital room and staying with me for a week after.!I woke from long naps to hear her humming in my kitchen, making food I loved. She ran baths for me and fearlessly changed the dressings on the grinning red scar. She held me up while I tottered around the video store and picked out “Driving Miss Daisy” because I thought Mama, who had long ago introduced me to “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Gone with the Wind,” would love this new Southern story.!“I don’t want to watch a movie about an old lady,” she said. “Let’s get ‘Pretty Woman.’” Over and over and over again she told me it would be alright. ! I believed her. When our week together was done, we hugged at my front door. A guttural sob erupted from somewhere deep inside her, like the roots of a drought-strained oak tree breaking ground, just before the
fall. “Mama, are you OK?” I asked. !She said she was fine, hugged me one more time and drove away forever. !!! Life owed me a baby. ! After the doctor shrugged off her failure and mine, Simon, out of options to comfort or connect, mumbled “I’ll wait outside.” ! “Whatever,” I said; mad he was leaving and guilty that I wouldn’t let him anywhere near me if he stayed. He made one last attempt before he shut the door. “I want to help you, but I don’t know where you are,” his eyes begged me to let him in. I didn’t know how. I was falling too fast to reach for him.
Light in Purse Christina Price Washington
Photographer Christina Price Washington negates the use of a camera to create the images in the series Light in Purse. Price Washington places light sensation paper in her purse and throughout the day, allows her normal activity to expose the paper; creating geometric and graphic silver gelatin prints. The paper becomes bent and creased, adding to the complexity of the simple images, while commenting on the space domesticity creates through her process.
Scene from a Twenty-First Century Holistic Medical Romance Will Holland The complaints mounted in size and intensity Once the day had aged properly. An epidemiologist’s Worst nightmare to find two black and white spotted dogs Running in opposite directions and wheezing like An incubated child confronting a foreign body. I wear a hawk mask to bed, wings obtained by osmosis to fly To the Alps and re-unite with Carl Jung’s shadow. At least! I don’t sleep on my stomach anymore. Inversion leads to halitosis. How often do grown men pillory about in a field To make a demand of the lethargic gray rain? Stop Mumbling about your plight, Job sticks with me Even as I dream of forgetting Anna Freud and handing A former therapist my pancreas. He didn’t believe Causality was a true constant, instead forming a sort of mirror That dances when my hand meets it. A sharing mind does little without attachments that, When formatted incorrectly, will earn a solid rejection From the Centers for Disease Control and Gordon Lish himself. Their standards vary in form but a singular purpose unites The wrong-way traffic of reluctant acquaintances. Just say hello. The minutes drift, my dryer plays a waltz, Numbers on my electronic bank account funnel toward An unsuspecting scapegoat: Epicurus.! The movies made Aurelius out to be a bastard. I hope! I think I can live up to the words that perceive strength In a pretty girl’s sigh, they glitter and smile when I’m attending Your bloodied knee. A blue bicycle accident at lunch time, Spilled oranges and a crushed wicker basket. Such a dull plague of ideas. Enough with the nonsense.!
A diseased carrier pigeon infects its offspring, notwithstanding! The message system we built around our desire for connection. If! We could make our invisible breath a zipline of strings and cans,! I might not get so sick of trying to untangle quantum decision making. The wheel spins and my beak always keeps moving.
Social Justice Kristin Leydig Bryant
Accusation Emily considered the Accusation dropdown options, twisted her mouth in thought, and finally decided that Withheld Emotional Closeness, Yet Continued Relationship was most accurate. Unjustified Breakup was also true, but in the end, what really bothered her was the way he did it, not the fact that he did it.!She took a sip of her coffee and shifted her weight on the sofa. The app’s display shifted to a detailed multiple-choice form, including the date the relationship began, when it ended, how frequently they had seen each other during that time period, when and where specific physical acts had commenced, trips taken together, and which friend and family introductions had taken place. As the app advised, she referred to her calendar for specific dates and times, to avoid discrepancies that might detract from her credibility later. By the time she had completed all the fields, Emily had drunk two more cups of coffee and felt impatient and jittery.!She uploaded the two maximum permitted images—a photo of Jody kissing her on a riverboat cruise, and a scan of the card he had given her for her twenty-fourth birthday.!She clicked Yes to All to link to their Facebook, twitter, email, and text history. She took a deep breath and clicked Submit, then entered her credit card information. The Accusation is complete, the app told her. Your case has now entered the Verification phase.!Please allow 48 hours from the moment of payment for an update.!The screen displayed a preliminary Relationship Timeline, with all major holidays automatically inserted. The images Emily had uploaded appeared at the appropriate places above the timeline events.!She put the phone on the coffee table and gave it a little stroke with her index finger. # Lauren sat down at her desk, coffee in hand, logged in, and clicked Review New Accusations. It was her third week as SocialJustice.com’s Director of Intimate Partnership Transgressions for the Southeast territory, and she was proud of her promotion and the company’s rapid growth. Lauren quickly scanned her matrix of accusations between married couples and lovers. The algorithm had organized the accusations by severity, so they were simple for her to scan. She sorted the lines into various combinations, looking for outliers or warning signs.!No red flags. After an hour of scouring the data, she approved the morning batch, imagining the 5,326 text messages chiming on mobile phones and dashboards from Greenville to Atlanta to Tampa to Miami. She glanced at the time on her computer. Ten minutes before her meeting with Brian. Enough to add a few flourishes to her proposal. # You’ve been Accused! the message on the dashboard proclaimed. Please log in to SocialJustice.com as soon as possible to submit your Verifications.!Jody’s eyes widened, and his face contorted. He struck the steering wheel with his right hand three times, hard enough to turn on his music
playlist.!“Damn, Damn, Damn it!” he muttered. He fumbled to turn off the blaring bleating of the unwelcome bluegrass (how had that shit gotten onto his iPod, anyway?), and raised his voice to command, “Delete text!” The text message disappeared from his dashboard console. Jody fumed all the way southbound on I-75 to his downtown office on Empire Avenue. He’d have to get this under control right away, he knew, or it could get totally out of hand. # The algorithm trawled networks in Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It searched email address books and mobile phone address books. It analyzed the use of ALL CAPS in text messages and emails, for specific positive and negative words.!It looked for mentions of key words (love, beautiful, fuck, kiss, sister, why) and determined the likely context, intent, and outcome of the conversation surrounding those words. It awarded points for any exchange that included the phrase “What I hear you saying is….” After several thousand calculations, the algorithm assigned an overall score to each Accusation. On the Accusation Home Page, the algorithm displayed this Objective Measurement to indicate the empirical likelihood of the Accusation, before any Interpretations. “The Objective Measurement is just one element of the total picture of any Accusation, of course,” Brian always told his investors. “But it is an important piece.” The algorithm paused, waiting for Jody’s Verifications.
Verification Jody reviewed his facts for the fourth time. It had taken his assistant more than two hours to confirm all the dates and times from Emily’s Accusation. Now it was almost time for lunch. The Accusation was already public; he’d had noticed the smirks of his co-workers in the hall. Emily had been thorough with her facts. Surprisingly meticulous.!“Exactly the kind of thing people loved to pass judgment on, especially women,” he thought. His eyes searched the Undisputed Facts, where his entries had synched with Emily’s. The details weren’t in question; he had confirmed most of Emily’s account. It was the Interpretations that would be difficult.!He winced at the scan of the terse card he had scrawled on her birthday. That didn’t look good. “Why did she do this? We hadn’t been that big a deal, had we?” He honestly hadn’t thought so. Sure, it had been a few months, and they’d done a few, well, things. A lot of things, actually, he remembered with a smirk. He had met her parents, and had made a good impression, as always. He had given her a decent night out (and a fantastic night in) for Valentines’ Day. “She can’t be that hurt. She’s just pissed off.” He shrugged and pressed Submit. This was not his fault. He’d be able to make things clear in the Interpretations. # Lauren left Brian’s office with a triumphant expression. She’d cracked the problem they had all been struggling to solve. She’d found the solution that broke down all the barriers.!Brian had confirmed it. He had shaken her hand, and grinned. Lauren strode down the hall to the elevator that led to the parking deck. She deserved a nice dinner tonight, with a martini, and she planned to take herself out to celebrate.
# As Becca poured their third glasses of wine, she called in to Sarah, “Hey, check this out. Look up the Social Justice app on your phone. It’s a trip. I saw it on Huff Post.” A few seconds later, she heard Sarah start to laugh. “Told you,” Becca said, as she carried two overflowing glasses of Chardonnay into the living room.!Becca sat next to her friend on the flowered sofa, and watched as Sarah’s download of the app completed. Then they both leaned back into the overstuffed cushions to pull up the app on their phones. “Sort by Atlanta, and then Straight Romantic,” Becca instructed. “Pick one that looks interesting.” Their eyes ran down the list of accusations, until they both squealed. “Jody Weller!” and then, in a lower register, “Asshole.” # The algorithm parsed Jody’s and Emily’s on-line lives, analyzing credit card receipts for their dinners out as a percentage of Jody’s reported income.!It found that Emily had tended to buy groceries on her evenings with Jody at a higher-end gourmet store, rather than the market she frequented for her normal shopping, and that she had purchased a matched set of underwear at Victoria’s Secret just before their first sexual intercourse.!Jody, on the other hand, had not acquired new underwear at any point during their relationship. He had, however, procured an X-box one week after they first had sex. The expensive cologne he had bought was assigned a lower number of points; it had occurred too early in the relationship to indicate any depth of feeling for Emily herself. !
Interpretation Emily pursed her lips as she reviewed Jody’s Verification entries. He had corroborated most of her facts, and she wasn’t about to bother with the few details that he had challenged.!“Petty,” she murmured. The few events he had added were stupid things, in her opinion. The Objective Measurement was encouraging, though: 89% likelihood that Emily’s Accusation had merit. Do you wish to continue? The app inquired. “Hell, yes,” she thought, and approved the second payment from her credit card. She hovered her mouse over the first Relationship Milestone on the timeline: How We Met.!A text entry box appeared. She had 140 characters to describe her state of mind and heart at each juncture on the timeline, especially noting pivot points where her feelings had deepened or been hurt. This was going to take a while. Over their trip to New Orleans, where the riverboat cruise picture was taken, she wrote simply, We made love every day. Most days twice. Four hours later, she came to the last two events on the timeline. Above the day he hadn’t shown up for dinner, she entered, He said he loved me but I think it was just EZer for him 2 stay w/ me than 2 break up w/ me. Until he met someone else. For the day of their breakup:
Jody wouldn’t even look @ me. He just said it = over & he didn’t really care. Had never loved me. I went home & vommed. # “Asshole’s Accusation hasn’t gone out to the public yet,” Becca said. “It’s still in Primary Interpretation. You’ve got time to sign up so you can add your Interpretations. Are you going to?” Sarah
thought for a moment, took a long swig of wine, and then set down her Reidel glass with a decisive thump.!“I wish I’d had this app when he dumped me,” Sarah whispered as she thumbed in the information to create an account. Becca cheered, “Oh Em Geeeeeee!” and did a little dance in a circle. Sarah ordered, “You sign up too. You know what he did to me.” The app informed them, Social Justice takes great care with our account holders’ information. We verify every Juror’s identity with local voter rolls before allowing a new Juror to add Interpretations to an Accusation. # Jody pulled up the Timeline on his laptop at home. A beer sat on a coaster at his elbow. Interpretation was where things got a little tricky, he suspected. The facts were established, now what had they meant to each of them at the time?!Emily was working on her Interpretations tonight too, he supposed. He wished that he could see hers before he wrote his own. No, no chance of that.!He googled effective Social Justice Interpretations for advice, and learned that under no circumstances should he use profanity or call Emily any names. The challenge was to sound sincere and likable, but not fall into the trap of expressing feelings he hadn’t had. He didn’t want to have to backpedal. He chose an event from their timeline at random: a concert they had attended in January. Emily had bought the tickets; he hadn’t been interested in that type of music.!“I went along,” he thought. “Isn’t that evidence I’m a stand-up guy?” But they’d had an argument, afterward, because she complained that he had acted bored. “That’s where I’ll say it started,” he decided. His thumbs flew over the keys.!I went 2 that concert 4 her. But that nite is when I started 2 feel less. It saddened me, but I kept hoping things would get better again. “Yes, that’s good,” he thought. He worked his way through the remaining Timeline events. # The algorithm analyzed the tone of Jody and Emily’s Interpretations for reasonableness, deducting points for inflammatory language, insults, or signals of manipulation.!It added points for the use of key compassion words.!It compared the vocabulary and cadence of their language to their on-line writing, to ferret out insincerity.!The algorithm created two Primary Interpretation Scores: one for Emily, and one for Jody. Jody lost points for using the word “saddened”; that word had never appeared in his writing before. The algorithm also sent four Pokes to the people in Emily and Jody’s social networks who seemed most likely, from their own social media conversations, calendar entries, and email/text history, to have the insights on the relationship. # Lauren pulled up the matrix for Accusations that were ready to enter the Public Interpretation Phase. She whistled softly at the volume; people had been busy last night!!This was a good sign for her stock options. People couldn’t ignore an Accusation like they had in the early days. She sorted the Accusations by Primary Interpretation Scores, and paid special attention to any Accusations associated with very high, or very low, scores. Lauren checked to ensure that the Interpretations were complete on each of those Accusations, triggering a few emails to individuals she felt had not been sufficiently thorough. She liked to believe that she gave everyone their best chance to represent themselves. For the
rest, she pressed Approve.!Icons linking to those Accusations would now appear on both parties’ Facebook pages, and tweets would go out referencing their @twitternames. The world could now weigh in on each Accusation. # Emily cursed under her breath. “Damn it! This crap Algorithm picked some guy I’ve never even heard of as one of Jody’s Pokes? He’s supposed to have insight into what happened? How much did Jody talk about me to his friends anyway? Who the hell is Ed?” # “Dude! !I got Poked by Social Justice for you!” James crowed when Jody walked into the bar for their weekly Bocce league. He punched Jody on the shoulder, hard. “Small potatoes, though. I only get five Juror points for my Interpretations. You need to step up your game. I don’t usually log in for anything less than ten points.” Jody sighed, and signaled the bartender for a draft.!“Do me a favor, James,” he said. “Just put a few things in for me, how she misunderstood what was going on, et cetera. You remember how she was, always pushing. It never stopped. Something like that. There’s this new chick at the office, and I don’t want her to see that crap.”!James shrugged.!“Whatever, man.!But you better hope their algorithm doesn’t pick her up from your network.!She might get Poked like I did. That thing is spooo-ky!” James pulled out his mobile phone to enter his Interpretations. Jody took a long drink from his beer. # Sarah texted Becca, ASSHOLE CASE = PUBLIC INTERPRETATION. I’M GOING IN! # The Algorithm reviewed all the Interpretations for tone and sincerity, as it had for Emily and Jody. Emily was fortunate; one of her Interpreters had a high Klout score in Relationships. The algorithm multiplied those Interpretations by a factor of 2.3. One of Jody’s Interpreters had a very low Klout score for Sensitivity. The Algorithm multiplied those by 0.68.
Deliberation When Emily signed in to SocialJustice.com, the ad for Super Weight Loss Energy Drinks popped up again. “Jerk,” she muttered. Jody had noted in his Interpretations that after they became lovers, Emily had let hrslf go. She squelched the impulse to enter a comment about his disgusting coffee breath.!She was an adult, and this was an adult, fact-based process. She opened a PM from the Social Justice administrator. The timeline is now complete. No further Interpretations will be accepted, the message said. We now enter the Deliberation Phase. Emily pressed View Timeline, and there it was, their relationship, spread across her screen like a multi-colored fishbone skeleton: all the events and interpretations from herself, Jody, the Pokes, friends and family, and anyone else who believed they had some understanding of Emily and Jody’s situation. Emily was surprised at some of the people who had
Interpreted, especially Jody’s ex-girlfriends. Some Interpretations had been marked with the Pants on Fire icon that indicated a lie.!Jody’s loser friend James had made some lame attempts to discredit her assertions of shared intimacy.!Em misunderstood J’s intentions, he had written over the Christmas Milestone. J didn’t have anywhere else to go, fam was in Europe. So he spent Xmas with her. Wasn’t big deal. !Three people had marked that one as Pants on Fire. # Becca and Sarah pulled up Jody’s Accusation. “Jack. Ass.” Becca said as they looked at Jody’s Interpretations.!“I see James is still hanging around,” Sarah remarked. “That’s not even how either of them talks.!They’re just trying to sound all smart and sensitive. Puh-lease.” Sarah clicked on Deliberate. They read the Juror Instructions together. “Guilty, that’s for damn sure,” Sarah said as she pressed the button. # Lauren watched for the Google Ad Revenues bar chart at the quarterly officers’ meeting with particular glee. “Good work, team,” Brian grinned. “Soon I’ll have to adjust my Y-axis!” The VP in charge of Search Engine Optimization looked a bit smug, but Lauren supposed she deserved it.!“Bonuses for everyone!” # Jody shook his head in disgust. “The famous Social Justice algorithm,” he scoffed. “Clearly, completely prejudiced.” The graphic thermometer on the right panel of the website showed Emily gaining a clear advantage. Thousands of people had proclaimed his guilt.!A rally from Reddit had risen up at one point in the middle of the night, but then a Socially Awkward Penguin meme had wicked away the momentum for his plight.!The tide was clearly not in his favor. Jody’s heart beat a little faster. Castigation was no fun. He’d watched plenty of them, even cast a few stones himself. Now he felt a little guilty about how he had pointed and laughed at those poor motherfuckers. # At the millisecond the Deliberation phase closed, the algorithm calculated the final verdict. This was the easy part of its job, a simple sum. It added up the votes for Guilty and Not Guilty, displayed the decision on the Accusation’s home page, and sent a PM to Emily to confirm her final credit card payment. It then notified its social media partners to begin their Castigations.
Castigation Unable to look away, Jody watched his castigations throughout the day, mouth slightly open. On his Facebook Wall, virtual animations of flying stones blotted the statuses and photos, over and over and over. Someone had hacked in blood spatter to the points of impact, and the sight of his mother’s face splashed with virtual gore made him wince. The hash tag #StoneJody trended in Atlanta’s Twitter
community until a wise guy came up with #ToadyJody. After that, photoshopped pictures of various exotic toads, embellished with Jody’s distorted face, scrolled rapidly up the timeline. He’d already received several texts containing emojicons that looked like obscene little hand gestures, and he expected those to continue for at least another week, as people cast their individual stones at their convenience. And Jody knew that could he forget about any email peace for at least a month.!Every spammer in the world had amnesty into his Inbox for 30 days.!Thankfully, LinkedIn’s policy was to participate only in businessrelated transgressions like fraud or insider trading, so Jody hoped that his professional network would never see this debacle. Of course, Jody’s Castigation would appear on his SocialJustice.com Permanent Record forever, comments enabled, for anyone who googled him. ! # “GUILTY!” Becca and Sarah howled in unison, when the decision appeared on their SocialJustice Watch list. They clinked their glasses in a toast. A little Chardonnay sloshed out of Sarah’s glass, but neither woman noticed. They checked Facebook and Twitter first, giggling, until Becca said, “What about Second Life?” There, an image of Jody was burning in effigy, while a circle of ghostly nude women frolicked around the flames. Sarah and Becca stripped off their avatars’ clothes and joined the dance. ! # Emily smiled, but her smile was a little wistful. “Maybe that will teach him a little compassion.” She deleted the app. #
Social Justice is pleased to announce Release 3.0! We have partnered with the Attorneys General of twelve states in contracts projected to save the taxpayers of each state an average of $37 million in the first year of operation. Let’s bring the Social to our Justice System!
Night in the Country Howie Good
There were no sirens, only more stars than I ever remember there being, a whole sky of heretics on fire.
Summer of Love Howie Good
There had been too many days without promiscuous strangeness. Unknown to me, one half of my heart was about to invade the other half. She looked disturbingly like the fairy princess who has just awakened from a decade of drugged sleep. Go ahead, laugh, but the cows on the hillside knelt to her.
What We Go For Christine Hoffmann
Friendship is an invitation, Boyd is sure. Say nothing of the strings attached. Say nothing of requests for gifts, for time, ideas about the menu. Say nothing of regrets: old pains flaring, old flames flaming, past times, a child who passed away. The man Boyd is, he’s discovered already that, as in a room, there are ways to accentuate the best parts of people. In the right light, with the right things about us, we’re fine, not slapped together and eating in front of the TV. ! All this in mind, Boyd has invited Merritt to help him arrange his new place—a large loft, with three floors! Boyd tells everyone, though the floors are only levels separated by a few small steps. Merritt has already tripped, twice. “It’s so big, so open.” Merritt speaks solemnly, as if leading tourists underground. Boyd isn’t sure whether she suspects or not, that her husband is cheating on her. He’s been trying to tell her every day of the week it’s been since he saw Charlie with the other woman. A girl, really. “It’s like a womb,” Merritt says next. Boyd is puzzled. Like a womb? Were wombs big and open? Pear-shaped, he recalls from health class. Also hollow. Whereas his place bursts at the seams. ! Merritt runs her fingers along various fabrics, peers at Boyd’s pictures; she zeroes in on a handpainted frame with his daughter Jane in the center, sprawled in the snow in Vail, the trip courtesy of the Make-A-Wish foundation. Boyd is in the picture too, sort of; his bent legs and one snow-encrusted glove. Boyd is surprised to see Merritt frown at the picture, as if it were an ashtray or urn. When she turns away she has to blink a few times, reorienting. “You really like it here?” she asks. “You bet.” It’s crowded, but that satisfies Boyd, somehow. Even the view of the beer can-strewn backyard of the fraternity house directly behind him. Even the front door opening directly onto a sidewalk, spilling him out onto rutted concrete slabs reeling with coeds—this every college-version of the weekend. That’s Thursday night through all of Sunday, he’d announced to Merritt, with the air of a movie mad-scientist announcing his demented assemblage. Behind Boyd the Sig Eps drink themselves into an oblivion more significant than any the suckers who’ve elected not to Go Greek can claim. In his own college days, Boyd was thin as a reed. And the girls didn’t like him. He’d make fists and rotate them beneath his eyes, “Boo-hoo, boo-hoo.” He became a poet. ! (Boo-hoo, boo-hoo.) “Let’s talk slipcovers,” Boyd says. “But first look how the bow-flex fits perfectly in the corner. Merritt, it practically nestles.” ! “Mm-hmm.” Boyd stares fondly at his gleaming equipment. Since Jane died he’d lived like any bachelor: 200 thread-count sheets, scratched Teflon pans, tilting bookshelves put together with screws. With the move, it
felt nice to pay attention to color schemes and place settings, like opening a new part of himself, a part Boyd assumed most single, straight men never explored. “Laying it on a little thick, aren’t ya?” Merritt asks, gesturing toward the entrance of Boyd’s bedroom, which is separated from the main room by heavy drapes tied with thickly braided rope. At night Boyd draws the drapes, feeling like Lord Byron, or the Continental. “I don’t know what you mean,” he says, and then he shows Merritt the gilt edges of his antique mirror, meets her eyes in it. Tell her now! says the voice of his poetic sensibility, crotchety usually, but which occasionally assumes the authority of Indiana Jones. Now! As if the job were to swing from a vine across a gaping chasm. Merritt checks her teeth in the mirror. “Okay, forget it,” she says. “But I mean it about the womb. I can’t see you getting laid here, Boyd. I can see you getting PMS.” Maybe it’s the brick walls, Boyd thinks, the red streaked with darker red, or the messy abstract he’s centered over the couch; the splotches of thickly layered paint might come across fleshy, striated. Boyd retreats to pour drinks. “Tell you what,” he calls from the bar. “I’ll buy a bunch of Washington monument paper weights. And a model train set. To counter the feminine imagery.” “Or just get a real girlfriend.” “A what?” Boyd hands Merritt her glass, then scratches his head in exaggerated confusion. ! Merritt rolls her eyes. There is a chance she knows about Charlie’s affair already. At the high school where she and Boyd teach, she has taken to spending off-periods alone, head on her desk. She reads self-help chapters aloud to her Earth Science classes. The substitutes suspect she’s the one stealing all the desserts from the faculty fridge. Away from school, Merritt and Charlie share a ranch house in the Hills that is so unnecessarily big, according to her, that the hallways actually stretch when you walk down them, like in Poltergeist. Merritt arranges the National Geographics on Boyd’s coffee table in an unimaginative stack, centering her sweating glass on the top. The Unbeatable Body, reads the topmost cover. What are its limits? “Probably I’m the one who needs a housewarming, not you,” Merritt says. “Or a housethawing. I still consider me and Charlie a hot couple, but then I remember the second law of thermodynamics: heat is the least useful form of energy.” “Right, I always forget that one.” Boyd shakes his head. If he were to tell her about Charlie this minute, she might sob into his arms or clock him with a candelabrum. She might laugh or sprout wings— Who knows? Merritt has two speeds, Boyd is aware, like a penguin; but she tries to live her life at both, simultaneously. She will eat Ben & Jerry’s while on the treadmill. She will read Boyd’s poems, frown, but frame them anyway, or clip them to the visors in her car. “I like a raised fist,” she explained to him two years ago, during a short-lived faculty strike. “But that’s where I stop. A fist in the air is worth two in the gut, that’s my thinking. That’s what I go for.” “I go for blondes,” Boyd had said. “I go for the gold.” He had not known what to say to her, had
not understood the strike, its demands, and he missed his students, all of them, even the stupid ones. “No, I don’t really. I go for the goal, maybe.” “Oh Boyd,” Merritt said then, her voice soft. She touched his cheek, and maybe he began to understand. “This I like,” Merritt says, moving into Boyd’s bedroom, which is sparse in comparison to the rest of the apartment. “You move to a new place, and you have to make your life over, right? You take the heat for it. Or from it, maybe,” she adds. ! “Go on,” Boyd says, following her into the room. “So now’s your chance to disown everything in your life you’re embarrassed by. You can claim it got delivered by mistake. Wasn’t it tempting to pack all the most important stuff in one box? You’d have to be particular. No bowling trophies.” “You know what? I did this!” Boyd says. “I put all of Jane’s stuff in one box,” he explains, thinking of the pictures, finger-paintings, old Baby Einstein DVDs he should really sell on eBay, drawings Jane had made for her mother and begged Boyd to roll up inside IBC bottles and throw into the sea. “Once I got it here, I spread everything in it all around.” ! “That’s what I mean,” Merritt says. Cancer took Jane two weeks after her sixth birthday, several weeks after Boyd first met Merritt, who pushed her way into his grief—brought him meals, wrote him notes, walked him to his car after school—made him feel, somehow, she could hear even his soundless mourning. !Past all that now, Boyd is surprised to see fresh pain collect in Merritt’s features. ! “Have you ever heard from her? From Fran?” she asks. Boyd winces. Jane’s mother was a woman he met years ago when he was still working as a librarian in Van Nuys. No, he hasn’t heard from her, as Merritt well knows. “Why would you ask me that?” Boyd walks to his bedroom window, lifts the blinds to reveal the neighboring fraternity’s half-completed homecoming float, the boys around it, laboring. Some have put on togas over their t-shirts and jeans. They pose for a photo, headlocking each other. Fran had responded despairingly to all his chit-chatty queries the day they met, reserving a halfsmile for the very end of the conversation, which Boyd would like to say smote him, reeled him in. Fran was quiet, pretty the way unhealthy girls can be, flushed and hiding behind their hair. She worked in a thrift store, where she spent her time chewing gum, trying to blow bubbles inside bubbles. “Maybe you should try library school,” Boyd suggested once. She’d sneered, the anger in her always near and protective as a dog. “Should I give it a whirl? Try it on for size? Jesus, Boyd.” “Well, I don’t know. Maybe you should try pregnancy.” That she’d laughed at, actually. And when she did get pregnant, she went meek and silent, until Jane came, and then she was just gone. “I don’t know why I asked,” Merritt says. “You never talk about her.” “She’s not part of my life.” Boyd isn’t even sure if Fran found out about Jane’s death. He doesn’t wish the knowledge on her, though sometimes he wishes other things: car trouble, acne, a tax audit. “At least you never married her,” Merritt sighs. “Marriage confuses things. Six years and I’m still
wondering the stupid basics: Are we happy? How can we make each other happy?” Boyd says carefully, “If you can depend on each other, that’s happiness. A husband should be someone you depend on.” “Depend on?” Merritt scoffs. “A mailman should be someone you depend on, Boyd. A husband’s something else.” She joins Boyd at the window, picks up his drink and drains it. She leans in, resting her head and the glass on his chest. “You know this like I know this, Boyd,” Merritt speaks half-into his chest. “It’s not just that people damage each other; it’s how they make it look so easy.” “Yes,” Boyd says. Like in front of the restaurant, the pretty girl holding Charlie’s face in her hands. ! Boyd strokes Merritt’s hair. “Merritt, look …” He hesitates. Look where? Look up? Look out?! She is so close. She knows, Boyd thinks, she must! So he won’t have to tell her. Merritt will do the hard part, but afterwards there he’ll be, handsomely unsurprised, telling her—what? !Of all the unfit men women like her must encounter, be wounded by, and come away from unspoiled? That? Boyd searches for better words. All week he’s been searching for them, he’s unpacked and looked around. But all he has is what he’s always had—that’s the thing about words. They’re the least fleeting of possessions. They sit there sagging and stained with use, like an old couch. ! She is so close. He is holding her face looking up at him. He is kissing her lightly on the mouth. And then not so lightly. “Well …” Boyd mumbles inside the kiss, as if it’s already over and ponderable. Merritt pulls away, stares at Boyd, his mouth still open, gawk-width, foolishly silent. He can remember how, after three weeks of rented movies and conversations in which he had to ask her, constantly, to speak up, he said “I love you” to Fran, and he was so eager to get it said—a rushing filled his head and he’d missed her reply, heard only a few syllables, what he decided later sounded like a drawn out ooooookay, and later still, more like Nooo Waaay. That’s another thing about words—you couldn’t rely on them. One moment you need a hero; the next you’re ordering a hero sandwich. You have a gun and suddenly you’re gung-ho. Gyp. Gypsy. Gypsy moth. ! “I’m not some beggar maid,” Merritt is saying. “I was a hot ticket once. Swear to God.” “I know that! You think I don’t know that? Walk outside to any one of these frat boys, Merritt. They’ll be all over you! They’ll think they’ve died and gone to you know where. They’ll think they’ve ascended!” Outside, the boys lean against the float in a line, drinking beer from cans held in multicolored cozies. Merritt, unimpressed, it would appear, drums her nails on the sill, and the sound seems to fill Boyd’s ears, become a pounding, steady music. At his old apartment, the nearby airport test-flew their new Boeings over the roofs of the neighborhood. The sound they made was the sound Boyd imagined Death affected, when it approached the dying, as he believed it did, many times prior to the death itself, only to pass, only to remind its listeners of its speed and screaming charity. Boyd hated Death for this, that Death could have patience for what it wanted, patience but not love. Love was strictly for the living, the ones who remained. !
Merritt bites her lip, watching the boys. Boyd senses something broken in her. Or perhaps it’s the opposite, and what he senses is rather her crowded elements beginning to mob. “A while back,” she says, “I got pregnant, and then I, uh, wasn’t anymore.” Boyd’s heart skips, flips in his chest. “There was something growing there, but it stopped. I mean I miscarried. When I told Charlie, I told him, This was our chance. I didn’t plan on saying that, but suddenly there it was in the room with us.” “And?” Boyd says, “He agreed with me.” Merritt waits to see what Boyd will do with this, what he will say. And Boyd should know what to say, shouldn’t he? Given what he knows about Absence, how it is the worst blow, how it shocks the whole body, all its poetry. All we want is to fill the spaces, the ones in us, around us, everywhere. Boyd did not look for Fran for long. It’s hard to say when he stopped loving her. For a while he wrote her letters, but he had nowhere to send them, so he kept them, folded, with his unfinished poems. He began to think of her as Jane did: alone, on an island, waiting for messages in glass. Maybe he never loved her.!!! ! Boyd inhales. “Merritt,” he says, ready to speak, ready to take the heat for this sham invitation, not to mention this place he can’t quite afford, the poems he never finished, the woman he never loved. Maybe it’s all connected. But for Boyd pain was never any cracked mosaic discovered pieces at a time. Perhaps it’s what made him a bad poet, that he kept his losses disconnected, singular. They were part of no larger tour de force. They were separate works of separate art. He could stroll from pain to pain leisurely, making no unnecessary connections, only ambling between each sharply drawn, precisely rendered, disaster. All of which he could explain to Merritt now, and maybe she would be comforted, even as he strung up more bad news. But another thing about words is they sound better in your head. Spoken, something escapes, is wasted, like heat. “One thing I’ve learned is if you listen to life long enough you’ll start to believe nothing inside it belongs to you. You have to convince yourself not to hide everything under the floorboards.” Merritt looks at him, no doubt wondering, is this advice? Confession? Some old poem folded into eighths in a drawer? “I mean we convince ourselves that we don’t have choices. We stick to the things we know. Why do you think nobody reads poetry in this country? Because the mind has limits—it’s beatable. But the body can take us places. I believe that.” He grasps one of the fists Merritt’s hands have made. ! “The body can take us places,” she repeats. “I believe that too, Boyd. But what you’ve got to understand is I hate my body. I wouldn’t go anywhere with it. I would say to it, if I could, I never want to see you again.” Merritt disentangles her hands from Boyd’s; she moves quickly away from him and out of the room. “God, Boyd, the things that come out of me lately—my own mouth,” she calls back. “It’s like it’s not up to me. What’s going on in here? Matter created, matter destroyed.” As she walks, Merritt slices
her hand through the air in two swift chops. “And here I’ve been teaching that both are impossible.” !!! !Boyd stays where he is by the window. Words fail him; he fails them. Merritt searches for her keys. He should call to her, Wait! He should give it one more shot! That’s what a man did, after all. He gave things a shot. Bang! He shot them dead when the goal was to wound. Or maybe the goal was to miss completely. Boyd doesn’t know. He thinks this not knowing is what drives people away from each other, and he wants to apologize, on everyone’s behalf, even with no assurances, even knowing what people want is the promise. That’s the thing about words—people love them. Gyp. Gypsy. Gypsy moth. This is what people go for. But for what, Boyd wonders, will they stay? “Merritt,” he says, meeting her in the living room, reaching for her. “We spread ourselves so thin …” “Oh Boyd,” she stops him, and she is warm, her fingers, all of her, even her breath still chilled from the liquor, sweeping over him. And then she is gone. Boyd hears his door slam, before he knows it, her car start up and drive away. Alone, absently, Boyd picks up a picture of Jane. Age three, curls past her ears, reaching for the camera. No doubt in his mind, she is the best part of himself. The perfect part—Science be damned. Everyone is entitled to their portion of perfection. We invite it in; we offer what we can; we say things, and we try to say these things correctly. Like, we are imperfect matter, space going stale. These are things we might say. Boyd writes this down. He is also a poet. Not everything people do is a waste of energy. The wish to keep someone from pain, there is something beautiful about it, even though it is never quite perfect, like a picture taken on the count of two. This is what he could explain. To Merritt. To Fran. To the boys outside his window. Yes, he’ll start with them. They’ll have to learn sometime, these boys, what real men do: they take women into their homes and make them feel warm. It is how it sounds. And who could call it wasted effort? Words are said. The human capacity for grief is vast enough to be miraculous. It becomes belief, this capacity, and belief is always miraculous, even or especially when it’s wrong. Suddenly people are filled with what they’ve created out of nothing! Boys, Boyd will say, we are always defying the laws of science. Easy! Yet how could one not marvel? We grieve for losses not quite lost. Spaces never filled. ! The lives not lived.
Contributors
Kristin Leydig Bryant is a business consultant in Atlanta, GA specializing in change management and visual thinking. She is also president of the DREAM Dachshund Rescue board of directors. She loves the oxford comma. Anton Frost has appeared in Verdad, Parcel, ditch and The Adirondack Review. He lives in Michigan. Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, has written five poetry collections, including Cryptic Endearments (Knives Forks & Spoons Press), Elephant Gun (Dog on a Chain Press) and Strange Roads (Puddles of Sky Press). His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. apocalypsemambo.blogspot.com Christine Hoffmann teaches writing and communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her scholarly and creative work is published in Make Magazine, Eclectica, College Literature, The CEA Critic and, somewhat randomly, Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. She blogs about literature, language and teaching on TECHStyle, Georgia Tech’s digital pedagogy blog. Will Holland is an Atlanta native who graduated from Georgia State University with a degree in psychology. He writes poetry and short stories, some being published in small online literary journals. He teaches in Dekalb County Schools and hopes to enroll in an MFA program in 2014. Christina Price Washington was born in Santa Barbara, CA and resides in Atlanta, GA. She holds master’s degrees in Fine Arts and Art History from Georgia State University. Her work—included in such group exhibitions as Rising Movers & Shakers of the Georgia Arts Scene (2011) at MOCA—has helped shape the terms of contemporary photography in Atlanta. Ann Wilson lives and studies writing in Decatur, GA.!This is her first published work.